Interview David Davies, CEO of AgUnity, Global Agripreneur of the Year 2018 - Blockchain Innovation For The Agro-Industry
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David Davies is the founder of AgUnity & creator of AgriUT, a solution to deploy smartphones and a digital Token to smallholder farmers to help them lift themselves out of poverty.
He was awarded the Future Agro Challenge (FAC) Global Agripreneur of the Year 2018 for his work as CEO of AgUnity for helping lift low-income farmers out of poverty. AgUnity provides a smartphone and blockchain solution that improves trust and cooperation for smallholder farmers and is also used as a platform for a range of problems including mobile banking for the financially excluded, and data collection for developed world farmers.
The work by David and AgUnity has been globally recognised by the likes of IFC World Bank, Mastercard Foundation, UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), Oxford University and more.
David Davies Interview Focus
1. An introduction from you - background, overview, education...
2. Career highlights
3. Your company / companies, organisations and focus?
4. Can you let me know about your views on blockchain and agriculture and supply chain?
5. Can you tell us more about how your token and blockchain solution works?
6. What are your views in AI and agriculture and supply chain?
7. How do AgUnity manage issues with ESG?
8. How do AgUnity manage issues with carbon neutrality and climate exchange?
9. How do you see Society 5.0 - 4IR and all areas of digital transformation?
10. What are your goals and how do you see the future of work and the main trends in tech and society?
11. What are your visions for the present and future, especially regarding climate change?
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David Davies Biography
David grew up on a wheat and sheep farm in outback South Australia, before spending most of his career working in technology for global investment banks. This included Goldman Sachs, Lehman Bros, Nomura and a Global Head of Market Data Commercials at Standard Chartered Bank in Singapore.
Before this, David travelled through Africa with UNESCO recording a documentary series. This opportunity enabled David to see how poverty and exclusion were powerful forces keeping many communities in cycles of bare subsistence.
Working for large banks some years later, David saw a world where money and power replaced empathy and humanity and it never added up. David also travelled to Japan where he founded a Mobiletech that was acquired by a company in the US and started a company in Singapore that was also acquired.
All of this led David to start AgUnity at a hackathon in London in 2016, where the founders were challenged to come up with a world-changing idea to increase the income for a billion people. Their solution was a low cost smartphone and a safe transaction record system powered by blockchain, to tackle financial and digital exclusion for remote, rural communities.
AgUnitys’ global technology platform empowers thousands of organizations working toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals to connect with ‘the last mile’ farmers and communities. This customised smartphone & OS solution serves as a technological ecosystem; providing the people living and working with remote food supply chains with practical, accessible tools to connect, establish effective lines of communication and ensure an ethical, accountable means of trade.
Widely recognized by major NGO's and studied at leading universities, my team at AgUnity are currently running projects in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Pacific positively impacting farmer lives with profound and long-lasting effect.
In 2021, David and his team at AgUnity created an innovative special project to close the gap between farmer and consumer: AgriUT Foundation. This foundation was built as an independent charitable entity to complement the AgUnity smartphone platform for smallholder farmers.
Vision
AgUnity: Beginnings and Initial Challenges
“We knew we were onto something that resonated with a lot of people that were in the field and were seeing those problems, so the first thing you do in that situation is you send your lawyer up to live in the jungle, so John went out and lived in a house in Kenya, with no floor, and showering under a hose for a whole year, but what was really great about that is he’s spent so much time with the farmers, and we were able to work through designs, and come up with functionality that was very useful for them. To most application designers, that doesn’t sound very hard, but you’ve got to understand, with developing world farmers, you could give them something that was completely useless, and I would never tell you, because that would assume they didn’t understand something about it, and you were the technology guys from overseas, so it should be right. So it’s very very difficult to get feedback or any sort of design input from remote world farmers.”
AgUnity: The app solution
“It was I think, the most profound, the best way of summing it up, is that we were continuously like learning and pivoting so we started doing what everyone else did, and built a downloadable app that people could put on their own phone and we then encouraged a smallish, a very small group of farmers to go out and get Android phones, and I came back with all sorts of rubbish non-compliant phones. And we had a nightmare of getting any kind of a solution working on it. So that told us something very important. That started, that was in Kenya. We discovered that if you get a phone like that, that’s a phone that we were using initially, we were getting them a little above 20 dollars each, new out of China, so it’s not worth setting up an app and supporting them on someone else’s phone, when you can just give them the whole phone”.
About AgUnity
AgUnity is a fintech innovation company that connects a variety of organizations, especially working in developing countries, by building a platform that caters to their long-term basic problems.It is a reliable solution to the elementary issues including- lack of a platform that creates a digital identity for more than two million last mile farmers globally, their inability to establish their creditworthiness, poor or lack of connectivity which results in absolute ignorance to any digital exposition, and inaccessibility to vital goods and services.
AgUnitys’ global technology platform empowers thousands of organizations working toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals to connect with ‘the last mile’ farmers and communities. This customised smartphone & OS solution serves as a technological ecosystem; providing the people living and working with remote food supply chains with practical, accessible tools to connect, establish effective lines of communication and ensure an ethical, accountable means of trade.
The foundations of AgUnity were laid down by David Davies and his co-founder when they met at a hackathon at a tech conference in London in 2016. They presented “the biggest world changing idea” by conceptualizing a low-cost smartphone that would ensure digital inclusion of the remote and rural communities worldwide. While the blockchain concept was still in its nascent stages back then, they envisioned it to be the basis for their secured transaction record system.
Now after five years, they are an award-winning technology provider that have integrated digitization with farming, streamlining the supply chains for the remote communities globally.
David Davies Links And Sources
Supply Chain App Developer Using the AgUnity Smartphones Secured by Blockchain Technology | AgUnity
https://www.linkedin.com/in/daviesdavid/
https://twitter.com/xisonscom?lang=en
https://www.terrapinn.com/exhibition/planet-biometrics/speaker-david-DAVIES.stm
https://www.globalaginvesting.com/15-minutes-david-davies-ceo-founder-agunity/
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Hernaldo Turrillo is a writer and author specialised in innovation, AI, DLT, SMEs, trading, investing and new trends in technology and business. He has been working for ztudium group since 2017. He is the editor of openbusinesscouncil.org, tradersdna.com, hedgethink.com, and writes regularly for intelligenthq.com, socialmediacouncil.eu. Hernaldo was born in Spain and finally settled in London, United Kingdom, after a few years of personal growth. Hernaldo finished his Journalism bachelor degree in the University of Seville, Spain, and began working as reporter in the newspaper, Europa Sur, writing about Politics and Society. He also worked as community manager and marketing advisor in Los Barrios, Spain. Innovation, technology, politics and economy are his main interests, with special focus on new trends and ethical projects. He enjoys finding himself getting lost in words, explaining what he understands from the world and helping others. Besides a journalist, he is also a thinker and proactive in digital transformation strategies. Knowledge and ideas have no limits.
